Dheepan

SF Premier

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme D’Or, Jacques (A Prophet) Audiard’s latest film is an immensely powerful work that celebrates the human spirit, and the transformative power of human connection. The film chronicles the journey of a trio of Sri Lankan immigrants – a former soldier, a young woman and a little girl – who pose as a family, so they can escape into France. They end up settling in a housing project outside Paris – but it turns out that they’ve just left one conflict zone for another. Partly inspired by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, the film features novelist and former Tamil Tiger child soldier Antonythasan Jesuthasan in the lead role. As The Independent rightly says, Dheepan is “a radical and astonishing film that turns conventional thinking about immigrants on its head.”